🕊Taskmasters
Chandrakant Pandit tales, the last Indian to reach the Wimbledon semis & Pogba in the ISL
298 days. That’s how long the gap between the 4th and 5th Test of the India-England series will be. Surely, this has to be the longest series in the history of the sport.
But, stranger things have happened in this upside down world of Test cricket. In October 1961, England arrived in Pakistan, played a Test in Lahore and then went on a five-match Test tour to India. They returned to Pakistan in January to play the remaining two Tests!
The Myth of Chandrakant Pandit
“Probably, people call me very strict, you know, typical Bombay khadoos! I am that. That identity is very difficult to create because everything is being done for the betterment of the players and the team. I just keep them tight, that’s all,” said Chandrakant Pandit.
Pandit is a famed disciplinarian whose rigorous coaching style has seen him win 6 Ranji Trophy titles - three with Mumbai, two with Vidarbha and the most recent with Madhya Pradesh. Pandit’s redemption narrative - of how he won the title at the same venue 23 years after losing it as captain with MP - has been well documented.
We will be focusing more on his coaching ethos and have collected some of the stories that make up the legend of Chandrakant Pandit.
When he was given the MP coaching job in 2020, one of his conditions was that he had a free-hand in selection and how the team was run. At the start of his tenure, Pandit interviewed all 150 probables for the team. The process took weeks but for Pandit, it was the first stepping stone towards success.
To get the players out of their comfort zone, Pandit once called them up at 1:30am and asked them to report for training at 2am. The session dragged on until 5 in the morning. Abhishek Nayar, who played under Pandit during his time in the Mumbai team, has called him the “best first-class coach in the country”. Nayar obviously imbibed this aspect of Pandit’s methodology into his own coaching; keen BwC fans will remember how Dinesh Karthik spoke of the rigours Nayar put him through when he was plotting his comeback into the national team.
To mentally toughen the players, he had them take sessions with instructors from the Infantry School, one of the leading institutes for the Indian army.
For one of Vidarabha’s semi-finals against Karnataka, he confiscated the players’ phones as he feared they would keep checking them at night and lose their focus. Don’t we all need a Chandu Sir to help us combat our bedtime scrolling?
When captain Aditya Shrivastava approached him last year to ask what date he should pick for his wedding, Pandit told him to pick a date in June and told him that he would get only 2-3 days off. He also told him that he won’t get time for a honeymoon as the team’s preparations would have begun by then. Shrivastava is yet to go on his honeymoon.
When he was a coach at Vidarbha, there were reports that he had slapped a young player. When an official on the state board found out about this, he summoned Pandit and essentially told him that he has the license to lash the player until he is disciplined.
“Sometimes you can be the villain in the team, and that can help the team get together. And he is happy doing that, being this strong headmaster and everyone rallies against him. Not a lot of people can do that. He does not play safe,” said Nayar.
He is a stickler for punctuality. If a player was late for a session, he had to sit it out. And if a player arrived after the time given for the team’s departure, he had to arrange and pay for his own transport.
"While other teams reached the knockout venue 4-5 days earlier, we reached there almost 20 days in advance. We arranged practice matches against teams from Karnataka and Jharkhand. This helped the team to overcome Punjab and Bengal in the quarterfinal and semifinal respectively to make it to the final,” said MPCA secretary Sanjeev Rao.
While DK compared Pandit to Alex Ferguson, we think he’s of a similar ilk to legendary Argentinian manager Marcelo Bielsa. Bielsa, like Pandit, is a famed taskmaster unrelenting in his process and unforgiving on the players. Such coaches push their players to physical and mental extremities that break pain barriers. But, this is exactly why the players they have coached worship them.
The only Indian to reach the Wimbledon semis
This year’s Wimbledon, unlike previous years, has a lot of missing elements - Roger Federer won’t be at SW1 for the first time since 1998, all Russian players and Belarusian players have been banned, there are no ranking points available to players and it’s the first Wimbledon where the world #1 and #2 will be absent (Zvervev is injured and Medvedev is banned because of his nationality).
The one missing element that has remained a constant across the past few editions of the Wimbledon has been poor Indian representation. This year Indian contingent features only two players - Sania Mirza and Ramkumar Ramanathan - both of whom will be competing in the doubles category. There are currently no Indian players in the top-150 singles ranking and since Sumit Nagal’s appearance in last year’s Australian Open, no Indian player has made it to the main draw of a Grand-Slam. Nagal’s first round win at the US Open in 2020 was the first for an Indian since 2013.
In such bleak times, all we can do as Indian tennis fans is revel in the past and celebrate the achievements of yesteryear’s heroes. Ramanathan Krishnan is one such doyen of the past who has a strong claim to be India’s greatest ever tennis player.
Krishnan, to date, is the only Indian to have made it to the semi-finals of a Grand Slam. In the successive years of 1960 and 1961, Krishan reached the semi-finals of the Wimbledon where both times he was defeated by the eventual champions Neale Fraser and Rod Laver respectively. In 1954, he won the Wimbledon Juniors Championship and in doing so, became the first Indian to win a Junior Grand Slam. While the ranking system was formally introduced only in 1975, Krishan was the World 3 in 1959. No Indian player has even come close to matching this feat.
Krishan’s run to the Wimbledon semi-finals in 1960 was particularly memorable. His preparation in the lead-up the tournament was far from ideal; in April that year, he contracted chickenpox in Thailand while on tour with the Davis Cup team. After spending 2 weeks in quarantine in a Bangkok hospital, he flew back to Chennai for his wedding. Hailing from a religious family, Krishnan and his wife had to spend the weeks following their marriage visiting numerous temples.
He reached England short of match-fitness but luckily for him, he had received a seed. At the time only 8 seeds were handed out and Krishan was the 7th seed. It meant he wouldn’t come up against a seeded player until the quarterfinals.
After scraping through in five sets in the first round, he played in the men’s doubles event match the next day. That game too was a five-setter and while he did finish on the losing side, it helped him regain some of his momentum. The rhythm he had found helped Krishan in his 2nd round tie, when he found himself a set down and 0-3 in the 2nd set. Thinking the match was done, some spectators began leaving the arena. But, Krishan rallied and won the next 12 games and marched into the 3rd round, which he won in straight sets. Krishan again prevailed in the fourth round tie that went to five sets and reached his first ever quarterfinal. He defeated 2-time French Open finalist Luis Ayala ( who had never lost to Krishan before this) and became the first Indian to reach the semis. But that’s as good as it got for Krishnan, who fell to the then world #1 Neal Fraser.
“I had beaten Fraser to win the Queens title a year earlier. And I had beaten him many more times on the tour. In my entire career, I’d lose to him just two times. Once at Wimbledon, and then at the Davis Cup. That was one weird thing about the Australians. They’d lose the tour matches, but the ones that count, the big ones, they’d play at a level you didn’t see before,” he said in an interview to The Indian Express.
But, perhaps the greatest indication of Krishan’s stature in the game came in the 1959 Wimbledon final.
"I knew if I could get past Krish, I will win the tournament," said Alex Olmedo, the Wimbledon champion that year, in his victory speech. Olmedo had defeated Krishan in a tightly contested third round match that year.
Person of Interest
On Saturday, ATK Mohun Bagan announced the signing of Guinean defender Florentin Pogba on a two-year deal from Ligue 2 side Sochaux . Now, normally the arrival of a player who has spent a majority of his career plying his trade in the French 2nd division and the lower reaches of European football wouldn’t make headlines.
It isn’t Florentin’s footballing talent as much as his fraternal relationship that has created waves in Indian football circles. Florentin is the elder brother of World Cup winner and former Man United and Juventus midfielder, Paul Pogba.
While he has spoken about his excitement at experiencing Kolkata’s “special atmosphere”, he will be all too aware that with great last names, comes great pressure. The name on the back of his jersey will unduly skew expectations.
Florentin Pogba got us thinking about the 22 Yarns episode with Rohan Gavaskar, where he spoke of dealing with the weight of his father’s legacy. He recalled an incident from his first Kanga League game as a 12-year old when after getting out cheaply against a team of grown men, the newspaper headline the next day read ‘Like father, unlike son’. Gavaskar spoke of dealing with the pressure by accepting that his father was a once in a lifetime player; he didn’t want to be the next Sunil Gavaskar but just the best player that he could be.
Florentin Pogba, too has spoken of how he deals with the comparisons with his brother.
“Of course there are times when I’m referred to only as ‘the brother of’. But why should that bother me? I’m proud of my family and, besides, whenever I hear that stuff I always think that nearly every other player on the pitch is also someone’s brother,” he said in an interview to The Guardian in 2017.
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